REPORTER'S VIEW

By JANET L. FIX
For The Herald

It all began, as things often did in The Conch Republic, with a rumor.

``Castro wants us to come! Fidel's heart has changed! A boat bringing many Cubans will arrive tonight!''

When I heard, I was at my desk in The Herald's storefront Key West bureau, sipping the café con leche that fueled my work as one of two reporters covering the 32-mile stretch of the Florida Keys.

INTERACTIVE

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Then, as if proof, sometime after dark a fishing boat crammed with refugees neared a Key West dock. It was the first of a rag-tag armada that would make an historic 90-mile trip in the spring of 1980 and return with 125,000 Cuban refugees.

We raced to the Key West Naval Annex dock and jumped the fence surrounding the military base. We were stopped short of our goal by a good stretch of sea. My colleague dropped into a motor boat, intent on ''borrowing'' it.

I had broken few laws since leaving Lincoln, Neb., where I grew up, graduated from the University of Nebraska two years earlier and was recruited by The Herald as a summer intern.

So I opted to flag down a passing yacht, a 46-foot Bertram appropriately named Touche. Being young, blonde, and if crazed perhaps harmless, helped.

The captain pulled up, checked us out, and dropped us off on the Naval dock in time to witness the refugee boat unload. In the chaos, I asked the captain to give me a lift on to Mariel, and he agreed. (My reporting colleague reluctantly stayed behind in Key West to cover events unfolding there.)

The captain, Jose Manuel Carbonell, hoped to reunite with the father he left when he fled Cuba in 1958. His daughter, Martica, and her husband accompanied him.

Within hours of leaving Key West, I was whispering terse ship-to-shore radio reports from Mariel harbor, while hiding under a tarp.

My daily dispatches ran without my byline. Armed Cuban police had boarded our boat, logged our names and ordered us to stay off our ship's radio -- on threat of imprisonment.

The Herald published my dispatches as supplied ''by an anonymous crewman.'' They carried breathless headlines quoting Americans stuck in Mariel: ''We're Sitting on a Powder Keg'' and ``Food Running out; We could starve.''

Our day trip became a week of waiting. Boats left only after being forced to take on refugees. Desperate refugees swam from shore to waiting boats. Tempers flared. Hired boat captains, who had been paid handsomely by Cuban exiles to make the 90-mile trip, demanded $400 more each day they were forced to stay.

I returned to Key West on another boat after the captain's food and water supplies had run low. But by then, patience had also run out. My last dispatch, May 1, 1980, captured the shared sense of betrayal in Mariel: ``Fidel Manipulating Boatlift.''

Janet Fix worked as a Herald reporter from 1978 to 1983.